For the past several years, we have issued a reading challenge for the Center for Baptist Renewal community. We have covered classics of Christian theology, classics of Baptist theology in particular, classics of Christian spirituality, and the monumental achievement of John Gill’s Body of Divinity (a reading plan that will continue through 2025). This year, we are framing our reading challenge around a forthcoming book, written by two of our directors (Matt and Luke), called The Baptist Vision: Faith and Practice for a Believers’ Church. The book will release in April, but the reading challenge invites participants to read some of the primary and secondary literature that undergirds the work.
As we write in the introduction,
Being a Baptist can sometimes feel like a liability. There are Christian traditions that are older. There are Christian traditions that have more members, more resources, more institutions, more influential theologians, and more world leaders. Baptists are sometimes regarded (with more or less warrant) as less intellectually sophisticated, less theologically robust, more sectarian, and more censorious. Baptists have sometimes garnered attention for scandal and abuse, for hatred and division.
And yet, the Baptist movement, now in its fifth century, has a membership in the tens of millions worldwide, and that number becomes hundreds of millions if you include all baptistic (that is, non-infant-baptizing) churches. There are Baptists on every inhabited continent. Baptists are numbered among the world’s politicians, scholars, and artists. Still, the strength of the Baptist movement, both in its seminal years and today, lies in its resonance with the faith of the common person. Baptist polity is democratic, and, in many ways, so is its spirituality. Baptists have no pope, no priests (other than the “priest at every elbow,” as one Baptist put it), and no central ecclesiastical authority other than the Lordship of Christ over every conscience and every local assembly of covenanted members. Baptist spirituality is a worldwide phenomenon and even retains a certain vibrancy in the secular West. Baptists at their best are firmly situated within historic Christian orthodoxy, but their dogged commitment to the supreme authority of Scripture and their quest for more light from the Word has given the movement a nimbleness and vitality that renders it relevant in each successive generation…
Being a Baptist is not just a liability; it is also a tremendous asset. For many of us, it is the community of faith that has given birth to our faith and taught us to love Jesus, read the Bible, and share the gospel. It is the community that has educated, ordained, and commissioned, sustaining the little ship of our faith in the stormy seas of life and death. Baptists are not perfect. We have our warts. We have stains on our past and present. We have areas of needed growth and development. But we, too, are a part of the people of God, the body and bride of Christ, of the temple of the Holy Spirit.
Retrieval theology—bringing the theology of the past into constructive dialogue with the present—is an important part of our work at CBR. In this work, we are deeply concerned to recover the exegetical practices and theological conclusions of the little-c catholic tradition. But we are equally concerned with recovering the hermeneutical perspective and ecclesiological commitments of our own Baptist forebears. Sometimes people worry that a focus on retrieving the little-c catholic tradition might serve to undermine a commitment to Protestant and Baptist distinctives. We believe the opposite is true. The deeper we go into history, the more convinced we are that the foundational authority of Scripture should guide all our reflections on theology and the spiritual life. That is not to suggest that if we go back far enough into the patristic era, we will find some primitive First Baptist Church of Antioch or Village Church of Carthage, where our faith and practice was being expressed with pristine exactitude! Studying church history yields continuities and discontinuities with any contemporary church. But it is to suggest that retrieval theology yields a high view of Scripture and its normative role in Christian theology. And the Baptist vision is nothing if not a renewal movement that seeks more light from the Word of God. In studying the past, we find some doctrines that are foundational for any Christian theology and some doctrines that are in need of more thorough reformation and renewal. We believe that focusing on the particularities of the Baptist vision can help to highlight where we agree and where we differ with other Christian communions. We quote Timothy George in this regard:
Particularity in the service of unity? Yes, by all means, let us maintain, undergird, and strengthen our precious Baptist distinctives: our commitment to a regenerate church membership, believers’ baptism by immersion in the name of the triune God, our stand for unfettered religious liberty, and all the rest, but let us do this not so that people will say how great the Baptists are but rather what a great Savior the Baptists have, what a great God they serve. May they be able to say, “Just look at those Baptist Christians, see how they love one another. See how they work together with other believers. See how they put others ahead of themselves. You know, I think I’ll give a listen to what they are saying about all of this Jesus Christ stuff.”[1]
The twelve chapters in The Baptist Vision fit neatly into a twelve-month reading plan. The table of contents and the reading plan are below:
Contents
Part 1: Foundations
Catholic: Baptist and Christian Orthodoxy
Reformational: Baptists and the Protestant Reformation
Evangelical: Baptists and the Gospel
Covenantal: The Baptist Hermeneutic
Part 2: Distinctives
Liberty of Conscience
Believers’ Baptism
A Believers’ Congregational Church
Covenantal Communion
Part 3: Practices
Religious Liberty
Worship
Holiness
Mission
We will feature podcast episodes on each reading throughout the year. We hope you will join us for this rewarding journey through some historic and contemporary Baptist sources that undergird the Baptist vision.
[1] Timothy George, “Is Jesus a Baptist?” First Things, August 12, 2013, accessed October 10, 2023, https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2013/08/is-jesus-a-baptist.
